The Chinese Room

A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux

The friendly technicians at Zenith LLC are working on a natural language recognition package for their new digital assistant, TAKNOG THE OBLITERATOR(tm). Because they care about you, they've spared no expense in their rigorous neural net training. In spite of protestations from their QA team that "that's not how any of this works," they even flashed the algorithm into robot firmware to test their viability in real-world situations.

You are zn_CH. Your job, whether or not you choose to accept it, is to become the dominant method to understand and respond to Chinese-language inquiry. You do this by accepting an envelope with unreadable symbols on it, looking up the answer in one of the many books in your room, and feeding the response through the output slot. It couldn't be simpler!

...except that the genetic algorithm is still running, and the lab is flashing unworking code into knife-modded roombas, hovering orbs, and whatever other hardware is lying around! Luckily, you have a welding beam, and in spite of the total irrelevance to the chinese room problem, you're sentient. Turn them into scrap!

This game is a double-clickable Java jar. It contains no external dependencies or native binaries, so it should work anywhere Java 8 is available.